Introducing Morphology

Introducing Morphology
Author: Rochelle Lieber
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 229
Release: 2010
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0521895499

A lively introduction to the study of how words are put together.

Computational Approaches to Morphology and Syntax

Computational Approaches to Morphology and Syntax
Author: Brian Roark
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2007-08-09
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 019153451X

The book will appeal to scholars and advanced students of morphology, syntax, computational linguistics and natural language processing (NLP). It provides a critical and practical guide to computational techniques for handling morphological and syntactic phenomena, showing how these techniques have been used and modified in practice. The authors discuss the nature and uses of syntactic parsers and examine the problems and opportunities of parsing algorithms for finite-state, context-free and various context-sensitive grammars. They relate approaches for describing syntax and morphology to formal mechanisms and algorithms, and present well-motivated approaches for augmenting grammars with weights or probabilities.

Boundaries of Morphology and Syntax

Boundaries of Morphology and Syntax
Author: Lunella Mereu
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 322
Release: 1999-06-15
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027284628

The volume collects a selection of papers presented at a European Colloquium held at the Università degli Studi di Roma Tre in October 1997. It focuses on phenomena at the boundary between morphology and syntax, and provides analyses for data from the fields of both inflectional and derivational morphology and word order. Morpho-syntactic phenomena are analysed cross-linguistically and cross-theoretically, as typologically-different languages (European, Afro-Asiatic, American and Austronesian ones) are dealt with and compared according to a variety of approaches, from minimalism and lexical-functional grammar to grammaticalization theory, taking into account both synchronic variation and diachronic change. The volume is divided into three sections: I. Morphological phenomena and their boundaries, II. Morpho-syntax and pragmatics, and III. Morpho-syntax and semantics, as the interaction with the higher components of the grammar is seen as contributing to explaining variation in morpho-syntactic behaviour.

Interaction of Morphology and Syntax in American Sign Language

Interaction of Morphology and Syntax in American Sign Language
Author: Carol A. Padden
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 190
Release: 2016-11-25
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1315449668

This study, first published in 1988, examines cases of interaction of morphology and syntax in American Sign Language and proposes that clause structure and syntactic phenomena are not defined in terms of verb agreement or sign order, but in terms of grammatical relations. Using the framework of relational grammar developed by Perlmutter and Postal in which grammatical relations such as "subject", "direct object", etc. are taken as primitives of linguistic theory, facts about syntactic phenomena, including verb agreement and sign order are accounted for in a general way. This title will be of interest to students of language and linguistics.

The Syntax-Morphology Interface

The Syntax-Morphology Interface
Author: Matthew Baerman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 316
Release: 2005-09-15
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9780521821810

This pioneering book provides a full-length study of inflectional syncretism, presenting a typology of its occurrence across a wide range of languages.

Tools for Analyzing the World's Languages

Tools for Analyzing the World's Languages
Author: John Albert Bickford
Publisher: Sil International, Global Publishing
Total Pages: 426
Release: 1998
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN:

A textbook and practical guide for acquiring skills necessary to analyze the morphology and syntax of languages around the world.

One-to-many-relations in morphology, syntax, and semantics

One-to-many-relations in morphology, syntax, and semantics
Author: Berthold Crysmann
Publisher: Language Science Press
Total Pages: 294
Release: 2021
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3961103070

The standard view of the form-meaning interfaces, as embraced by the great majority of contemporary grammatical frameworks, consists in the assumption that meaning can be associated with grammatical form in a one-to-one correspondence. Under this view, composition is quite straightforward, involving concatenation of form, paired with functional application in meaning. In this book, we discuss linguistic phenomena across several grammatical sub-modules (morphology, syntax, semantics) that apparently pose a problem to the standard view, mapping out the potential for deviation from the ideal of one-to-one correspondences, and develop formal accounts of the range of phenomena. We argue that a constraint-based perspective is particularly apt to accommodate deviations from one-to-many correspondences, as it allows us to impose constraints on full structures (such as a complete word or the interpretation of a full sentence) instead of deriving such structures step by step. Most of the papers in this volume are formulated in a particular constraint-based grammar framework, Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar. The contributions investigate how the lexical and constructional aspects of this theory can be combined to provide an answer to this question across different linguistic sub-theories.

Studies in Övdalian Morphology and Syntax

Studies in Övdalian Morphology and Syntax
Author: Kristine Bentzen
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Total Pages: 239
Release: 2015-01-22
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027269130

Övdalian is spoken in central Sweden by about 2000 speakers. Traditionally categorized as a dialect of Swedish, it has not received much international attention. However, Övdalian is typologically closer to Faroese or Icelandic than it is to Swedish, and since it has been spoken in relative isolation for about 1000 years, a number of interesting linguistic archaisms have been preserved and innovations have developed. This volume provides seven papers about Övdalian morphology and syntax. The papers, all based on extensive fieldwork, cover topics such as verb movement, subject doubling, wh-words and case in Övdalian. Constituting the first comprehensive linguistic description of Övdalian in English, this volume is of interest for linguists in the fields of Scandinavian and Germanic linguistics, and also historical linguists will be thrilled by some of the presented data. The data and the analyses presented here furthermore challenge our view of the morphosyntax of the Scandinavian languages in some cases – as could be expected when a new language enters the linguistic arena.

Morphology-driven Syntax

Morphology-driven Syntax
Author: Bernhard Wolfgang Rohrbacher
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 306
Release: 1999
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027227365

This book argues that syntactic parameters are set in a principled fashion on the basis of overt functional morphology. The main focus of the book is on the different positions of the finite verb in the Germanic SVO languages. In addition, other syntactic phenomena (null subjects, transitive expletive constructions and object shift) and other language families (Romance, Semitic and Slavic) are discussed. A common explanation for all of the discussed phenomena is proposed: If and only if the features for “person” are distinctively marked by the agreement morphology, the agreement affixes are listed separately in the lexicon and project phrases of their own in syntax where they attract the verb to the head positions and allow the specifier positions to be filled by various phonologically (un)realized elements. Special attention is given to issues of historical development and child language acquisition.

English Historical Syntax and Morphology

English Historical Syntax and Morphology
Author: Teresa Fanego
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 322
Release: 2002-01-01
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9789027247315

This volume offers a selection of papers from the Eleventh International Conference on English Historical Linguistics held at the University of Santiago de Compostela. From the rich programme (over 130 papers were given during the conference), the present twelve papers were carefully selected to reflect the state of current research in the fields of English historical syntax and morphology. Some of the issues discussed are the emergence of viewpoint adverbials in English and German, changes in noun phrase structure from 1650 to the present, the development of the progressive in Scots, the passivization of composite predicates, the loss of V2 and its effects on the information structure of English, the acquisition of modal syntax and semantics by the English verb WANT, or the use of temporal adverbs as attributive adjectives in the Early Modern period. Many of the articles tackle questions of change through the use of methodological tools like computerized corpora. The theoretical frameworks adopted include, among others, grammaticalization theory, Dik's model of functional grammar, construction grammar and Government & Binding Theory.